A First Walk in Peng Chau
“So what’s the plan for our walk in Peng Chau?” My besties finally had a chance to get together for a day trip to Peng Chau. “No plan, let’s just walk around aimlessly.” Sounds like a plan, and it turned out to be a good …
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Beautiful Sha Tau Kok – Declared Monuments in the Wo Hang Villages
I was looking for easily accessible heritage sites in northern New Territories. Research revealed that there are two Grade 1 Historic Buildings in the villages of Wo Hang in Sha Tau Kok. The first is the Fat Tat Tong of Ha Wo Hang Tsuen Village …
The Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb
The Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb Museum is a small exhibition of an excavated ancient tomb dated to the Han Dynasty. It stands as testament to the presence of China’s ancient civilization in Hong Kong. Indeed, it was rather surprising for me to learn that quite a number of Han Dynasty artifacts were discovered in different locations all over Hong Kong. My previous study on pre-colonial Hong Kong was mostly concerned the Chinese settlers coming from the Song Dynasty onwards, who would eventually acquire the indigenous inhabitant status under Hong Kong law when the British took over the New Territories. This museum has shown me a chapter of Hong Kong history that I had not known.
The Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb
Workers of the Lei Cheng Uk Estate, which was originally a resettlement area, unearthed the Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb in 1955 when they were levelling the ground for the public housing estate.
The Han Tomb lies on the slope of a small hill in that area, and the original Lei Uk and Cheng Uk, which were Hakka villages, were at the foothill. It has meant to face the sea, at only about 500 metres from the former natural seashore, which has since extended far beyond due to reclamation.
The layout of the tomb suggests that it belongs to the Eastern Han period. Its domed roof and barrel vaults are typical characteristics for the tombs of this time, and also popular in Southern China.
Interesting Artifacts
The government called upon Professor F.S. Drake, head of the Chinese Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to lead the excavation and dating of the artefacts in the tomb. The team unearthed a total of 58 pottery and bronze objects from the tomb.
Photo: (Left) A three-leg “fu” is a pottery piece serving as wine container or cooking vessel;
(Middle) A pottery model of a well; (Right) A pottery model of a granary.
I was particularly intrigued by the clay models of houses, granaries and wells. One stove model, two house models, two granary models and two well models were amongst the funerary objects at the tomb. The house models have wonderful details that show thoughtfulness and craftsmanship. I loved the figurines in the models. One is holding a child, and the other one is pounding rice.
Finally, the excavation team has found no skeletal remains inside the tomb.
A Look into the Tomb
The Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb is a Grade 1 Historic Building. The tomb allows just a brief look at some of its salient features at its entrance. No one can enter the tomb.
A large canopy above covers the tomb’s whole structure, and one only sees a plastic drape in front of the tomb before entering. The museum does a good job at keeping the mystery under wraps. I marveled at the mere view of the tomb’s front chamber.
At the pulling-open of the drape, one sees a clear view of the bricks that lay out the whole structure. The domed roof is ancient and grand. The glass case protecting it does not diminish the dramatic effect. The lighting was gentle, just enough to convey a sense of antiquity. As a tomb, it was meant to be buried in darkness.
It really would take less than one minute for one to enjoy the view of the tomb. I did look out for inscriptions on the bricks. The excavation revealed more than ten kinds of patterns on these inscribed bricks, mostly of geometric patterns, or some simplified animal images.
Photo: A model of the Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb.
“The tomb is a cross-shaped brick structure with four chambers and one entrance passage.”
Sources
Antiquities and Monuments Office, Declared Monuments in Hong Kong – Kowloon, Lei Cheng UK Han Tomb, Sham Shui Po.
Historic descriptions on-site.
How to Get There
By MTR, get off at the Cheung Sha Wan Station Exit A3 and walk on Tonkin Street toward the Lei Cheng Uk Estate for about 6-8 minutes. The museum is next to the Han Garden on your left.
I took about 45 minutes and read through every single exhibit there plus the interactive feature. This is one of the most engaging museums I have visited in Hong Kong.
The Spring Blossom at Cherry Street Park
It is approaching summertime now, but the spring of 2022 was a heavenly time for the photographers of Hong Kong. Fellow bloggers have taken wonderful photos of the spring blossom all over Hong Kong. In late April, my friend and I visited the Cherry Street …
The Former Fishing Farm at Po Kwu Wan
Po Kwu Wan is a small bay west of the neighboring High Island Reservoir in Sai Kung. The ruins of a concrete enclosure of a former fishing farm turns it into a moon-shape bay. It is quite an experience to “walk on the ocean” on …
Old Photos of Hong Kong – An Exhibition at the Asia Society
The Asia Society holds an exhibition Recovery, Resilience, Resurgence at the Chantal Miller Gallery of Asia Society. My friends and I paid a visit on a leisurely Friday afternoon.
The Exhibition
Recovery, Resilience, Resurgence is currently open until 31st July, 2022.
Recovery, Resilience, Resurgence features the work of three photographers, namely Hedda Morrison, Lee Fook Chee and Brian Brake. Their old photographs depict life in Hong Kong spanning the few decades between 1946 and the 1970s. From the end of WWII to the 1970s, Hong Kong has morphed from a war-torn British colony to a bustling city of industry and commerce, at the cusp of the economic takeoff of the 1980s.
The photographs present powerful images of Hong Kong that are both of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The exceptional pace with which Hong Kong developed its city and its social progress comes through loud and clear.
Curator Edward Stokes
“Her Beijing photographs were better than her Hong Kong ones.” Edward Stokes explains to the group that he is leading. I could not help but to stop and listen to what he has to say. The question is, did Hedda speak Cantonese and whether she interacted with her subjects. Edward Stokes explains that she did not speak Cantonese. She had also lived in Beijing for a much longer time and she spoke Mandarin, and the ability to engage meaningfully with her subjects was reflected on her Beijing photography. Yet her Hong Kong photographs are also powerful in their own ways, especially her portraits of ordinary folks.
When they stopped to look at two excellent portraits, someone in the group asks, “how did people react to a photographer pointing a camera at them?” Edward Stokes says that photographers had a way of handling unwelcoming gestures. The photographers would start shooting without a film in their cameras. They just kept pointing and pointing, and soon enough people figured that they were going to take their photographs anyway and would just ignore them. Then they put in the cartridge and started taking the real shots.
Curator Edward Stokes impressed me as someone who has a real passion for the art, a trove of exceptional knowledge about the craft, and most importantly, a genuine appreciation of the photographers, whose hard work made possible the visual records of history and heritage. Indeed, he himself is a photographer, and thus he is able to tell spirited stories and engaging analysis about these stills in the exhibition. Please see further below Edward Stokes’ discovery of Lee Fook Chee and his photography.
Nostalgia for Old Hong Kong
This collection of photographs are in a somewhat chronological order. Naturally, the older the time that they portray, the more interesting that they are. For both Hedda Morrison and Lee Fook Chee, the photographs are all in black and white. There are certainly many classic imageries of Hong Kong on display. But many others bring to life a past that has long been forgotten.
Lee Fook Chee
Both of my favorite photographs in the exhibition were taken by Lee Fook Chee. I liked his photographs because they convey the dynamics of old Hong Kong life. Still photos are perhaps not the best medium for capturing movements and sensualities, but Lee Fook Chee manages to do so with his Zeiss Ikonta.
While the other two photographers also have interesting life stories, I found the story of Lee Fook Chee to be particularly moving. Unlike Hedda Morrison and Brian Brake, who were established photographers by the time they took these photographs in Hong Kong, Lee Fook Chee had a harsh life. Photography was his means to earn a living, although he also did it with passion.
Born in Singapore in 1927, Lee Fook Chee was given up for adoption by his parents because they were too poor to raise him. Although his adopted family was well-off, they eventually had their own children and therefore he was disfavored. His adoptive father was a studio photographer himself. He was unwilling to live a life of mundanity in Singapore, and made it to Hong Kong in 1947.
Lee was at first a seaman earning low wages. In Hong Kong, he was unable to get work as a seaman and so he turned to a cousin who ran a studio. He remained an independent photographer, mostly taking photographs of the tourists at the Peak, and selling his photographs there, to make a living. His most prolific years were the 1950s. However, times have advanced to a state where cameras were becoming popular and individually-owned. In 1960s, Lee abandoned photography altogether, due to the fierce competition of photo-selling and taking at the Peak.
Yet, he preserved all the precious negatives of the photographs he took. They were in mooncake tins.
During the 1960s, he ran a grocery store and sold ice-cream on a bicycle. He had to give up his store when the government resumed the land in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he noticed an emergent trend of nostalgia for old photos. He set up a dark room in his own one-room public housing apartment to develop the prints from his 1950s negatives. He then began selling those old photographs again at the Peak. Edward Stokes, the curator, noticed him there in 2010, by the good hands of chance.
At this moment, tears welled in my eyes.
As a photographer himself, Edward Stokes formed an immediate bond with Lee Fook Chee. Thus began a year-long conversation about Lee’s life, his passion and his photography. They talked about publishing his photographs in a book. That they did, eventually, but Lee Fook Chee died of a sudden illness in 2012, while the development of the book was still ongoing.
“Unsung in his lifetime, a photographer of Hong Kong.”
It was heartbreaking to read this, but at the very least, Lee knew that his work received proper recognition before he died. What touched me especially was that his life, his fate, was so common as a Hong Konger in his generation. Yet the burden of survival has not dulled his keen eye for photography, his love for Hong Kong and his pride as a craftsman of memories. I saluted, to him, because he lived the very life that he photographed, and embraced every bit of joy and hardship of an era, now all but vanished.
Surely, the other two photographers had interesting life stories as well, and the exhibition has presented each of them fairly. But I will not spoil them for you here. The exhibition is worth a visit.
Some Thoughts
The period of Hong Kong on display at this exhibition is one that was neither experienced by us nor was it taught to us. But my friends and I are the generation that grew up in colonial Hong Kong, having close ties with the generations of Hong Kong people that experienced war, displacement and poverty as portrayed in these photographs. In fact, one of Hedda Morrison’s photographs portrays the Taikoo Dockyard in a postwar year. My own grandfather worked at the dockyard when he just arrived in Hong Kong in 1946. This photograph gave me the visual context for an experience that had significance in my grandparents’ life.
Sources
Descriptions on-site at the Asia Society.
How to Get There
The easiest way to the Asia Society is to go to Pacific Place. Take the stairs up toward the High Court direction, but turning left at the end of the stairs, with High Court and Hong Kong Park on your right. Then go along Supreme Court Road and head up Justice Drive at the roundabout.
Old-Time Vietnam – The Fishing Village of Bao Vinh
The breakfast at the Melody Hostel was something that I looked forward to every morning. The lady that cooked breakfast and managed the Hostel was Ling. She has two children. She showed me the photographs from their family vacations. I gathered from the photographs that …
Old-Time Vietnam – A Cooking Class for Hue’s Special Cuisine in Thanh Toan Village
A young Vietnamese woman came to pick me up in her motorbike. She had nice long flowy hair, perfect skin and a round face that said friendliness all over. She also spoke perfect English. I liked her immediately. Mandy was my guide for the day. …
Old-Time Vietnam – The Tay Loc Market and Other Good Food
I like visiting the local wet markets of Vietnam. The colors and smells of fresh produce in the markets are always so stimulating. Busy scenes of vendors selling food to morning shoppers are the best show of Vietnam’s vibrant street life. So on this free day I decided to see the Tay Loc Market (Cho Tay Loc) in Hue.
As the second-largest food market in Hue after the Dong Ba Market, the Tay Loc market sells all kinds of things, but of course I am first and foremost drawn to the fresh produce. Needless to say, at this type of market no one spoke English. They still invited me to look and buy the goods, and this was the local flavor that I was looking for.
I was hoping for a cheap meal and so I headed over to the cooked food stalls. To a foreigner, the wet markets would certainly look a bit filthy. But as Asian, I was also quite accustomed to these scenes. To me, the dirt in the wet markets is what makes it real. And there are clear efforts to keep it hygienic, such as keeping the tables and the dining ware dry and wrapped.
It was still rather early in the morning so the food that I was looking for, a local dish called Banh Bot Loc, probably did not open. I sat down at a noodle stall and had a wonderful mi quang bowl. The owner spoke some English, and usually the least that most Vietnamese can do is “where you from.” In their language they pronounce China as “Cheena,” so I said, “Hong Kong, Cheena” to her.
I told myself that one day, I will be able to speak enough Vietnamese to make these interactions meaningful.
There was a coffee house outside of the Tay Loc Market. This was the day after the DMZ and I told myself that I would have to relax a bit. I savored a leisurely “ca phe sua da” (iced coffee with milk) for a half hour. Life really was very good.
I figured that, to catch a grab bike, I would have to head on over to the Citadel. Close to the Citadel I came across another very local restaurant and ordered some loc tran. There were two kinds of clear-wrapped dumplings in the dish. One was a paste with a hint of sweetness. It might have been mung bean paste. The other was a dried sausage, clearly savory. The fish sauce beneath really augmented the flavors of the dumplings. The chewy and gluey texture reminded me a lot of the crystal dumplings in the restaurants of Hong Kong, but with a Southeast Asian character. I did like these much more so than the crystal dumplings in Hong Kong.
The grab bike driver argued with me on the fare, but he did finally take me back to the hostel for đ 50k. I could have taken a taxi with this price, but the grab bikes were always more fun. The initial fear I had for getting on the back of a motorbike has, by then, fully disappeared.
Old-Time Vietnam – The DMZ and the Vinh Moc Tunnels
The tour at the DMZ brought me to a place in a time long past. In the decades since, Vietnam has made great strides from the traumas of the American War. That also came with the serious and mutual efforts with the United States to …